Joseph
McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated
Senator]

Let me say to start that the publication of Arthur Herman’s book has made
my life easier.For a number of
years Harvey Klehr and I have been denounced for attempting to rehabilitate
Joseph McCarthy, something we had not done.Now with Arthur’s book out with its
defense, albeit a qualified one, of McCarthy, people can denounce Arthur for
what he did rather than Klehr and me for what we did not do.Arthur, my thanks to you for
diverting so much flak.

I think Arthur Herman’s book does an excellent job of correcting the
excessive, indeed hysterical demonization of McCarthy that has been typical of
far too many historical accounts.I
do not, however, share Herman’s positive appraisal, qualified though it is, of
McCarthy.

In my view the American Communist party was a real danger to American
democracy in the context of the early Cold War.Its chief threat was that of political
subversion, not espionage.It is
difficult to imagine that the political mobilization necessary for America’s
commitment to the early Cold War would taken place had Communists and their
allies retained the influence they had achieved in the labor movement and the
broad New Deal coalition.

But from 1946 to 1950 a internal civil war took place within labor and
liberal political institutions over the direction of postwar liberalism.Initially, the Popular Front liberals of
the Progressive Citizens of America appeared to be the stronger, but by 1949 the
anti-Communist liberalism of the American for Democratic Action had
triumphed.Initially, it looked as
if Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party with its secret Communist leadership
might wrest the mantle of heir of the New Deal from a faltering Harry Truman and
the Democratic Party.But after a
weak start, Truman reformulated the New Deal domestic program for the postwar
era and adopted a policy of confrontation with Soviet policy that transformed
him into the greatest of the Cold War liberal presidents.When the 1948 election was over, Wallace
and the Progressive Party had ceased to be a viable alternative to Truman and
the Democrats.And, finally, the
last bastions of Communist institutional strength were destroyed when the CIO
expelled it Communist-led unions.By 1950 only remnants remained of the once significant Communist role
inmainstream politics, civic
institutions, and the labor movement.The heroes of this, and they certainly were heroes in my view, were ADA
leaders such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr., anti-Communist liberal politicians such as Hubert Humphrey and Paul
Douglas, and anti-Communist labor leaders such as Walter Reuther and Philip
Murray.

Soviet espionage also had
been significant, but again, not all, but much of this was gone by 1950.The largest Soviet World War II
espionage networks had been destroyed or neutralized in the wake of Bentley’s
defection in 1945, the leads into Soviet espionage provided by Venona to
American counter-intelligence, by the FBI’s full-court press against the CPUSA,
and President Truman’s loyalty-security program for government employees.Soviet espionage continued, and
there is a good deal we do not know about what continued in the late 1940s, but
the level appears to have need considerably reduced.Oddly, some commentators have advanced
the argument that since Soviet espionage was reduced in the late 1940s, there
was no need for the government’s anti-Communist measures.This truly puts the cart before the
horse.If Truman had not
established a government employee loyalty-security program that removed
Communists from positions of trust, if the FBI and other government authorities
had not infiltrated, harassed, and prosecuted the CPUSA, if labor unions,
liberal political bodies, and other civic and private groups had not made
Communists unwelcome in their institutions, then the KGB and GRU would not have
changed what had up to that point been highly successful methods of
operations.They abandoned use of
the CPUSA not because they had ethical objections to this strategy or because
the CPUSA had developed moral objections to it either.Soviet intelligence abandoned use of the
CPUSA for espionage because it had become risky.Had the U.S. government not adopted
these policies, the KGB, GRU and CPUSA would have happily continued as
before.

But the policies were continued, and by 1950 the shockingly high level of
Soviet infiltration of U.S. government agencies that had existed during World
War II was largely gone.And, at
the same time, politically an anti-Communist consensus prevailed not only in the
Republican Party but in the Democratic Party and the major institutions of
liberalism.

Enter, then, Joseph McCarthy.McCarthy in my view threatened that anti-Communist consensus.He attempted to make anticommunism a
partisan weapon.Senator Joseph McCarthy painted the New Deal as part of a disguised
Communist plot and depicted Truman administration leaders Dean Acheson and
George Marshall as participants in a Communist conspiracy.There is no basis in Venona or in
the Soviet archives for implicating Acheson or Marshall as participants in a
Communist conspiracy or for describing either the Roosevelt or the Truman
administrations as the instrument of a Soviet conspiracy.To be sure, some officials, including
some very high ones, in those administrations displayed naivete toward Soviet
espionage, and internal-security policies until the late 1940s were notably weak
but there is no evidence that would justify McCarthy’s charge of administration
complicity.There were, indeed,
some government officials, including a few senior ones, who betrayed the United
States by assisting Soviet intelligence, but these persons were betraying
Roosevelt and Truman and their administration colleagues as well as betraying
the nation as a whole.

Normal democratic politics cannot proceed when one side in a partisan
battle regards the other as the enemy of fundamental values.Sometimes it is true that one force in a
polity does threaten the fundamental values, or the foundation rules of
democracy itself, or the institutional existence of other groups, and when that
happens with major political forces one has a genuine systemic crisis and
outcome may be civil war, as it was in 1861 when Southern political leaders felt
that the policies of the newly ascendant Republicans threatened slavery, an
institution then fundamental to Southern society.Or it may be true but the political
force that threatens fundamental values is a not a powerful one and can be
marginalized, as American Communists were in the late 1940s,while leaving the major participants in
democratic politics largely unaffected.But sometimes it isn’t true, and we have a crisis generated by
demagoguery and malign partisan zeal when one side falsely or mistakenly
attempts to paint the other as illegitimate.In my view that is what McCarthy
attempted to do, and is why I view his role as a negative one.

He did not succeed, and did not even come close.As I said earlier, I do not regard
McCarthy as some sort of monster who terrorized the nation and seriously
threatened its democratic value.Rather than the Great Satan he is depicted as in many histories, he was a
minor devil.In my view the new
evidence in general vindicates the broad anti-Communist consensus of American
politics in the late 1940s and 1950s but does not vindicate Joseph McCarthy in
the particular.

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Comment
regarding Venona

In 1992 Harvey Klehr and I published a history of the Communist Party,
USA entitled The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven
Itself.In this book we spent
only a few pages on espionage.We
did put forward evidence that American Communists had assisted Soviet espionage
against the United States.But the
limitations of the evidence then available made us cautious in our broader
judgment.We wrote
that:

”Ideologically,
American Communists owed their first loyalty to the motherland of communism
rather than to the U.S., but in practice few American Communists were
spies.The Soviet Union recruited
spies from the Communist movement, but espionage was not a regular activity of
the American C.P.The party
promoted communism and the interests of the Soviet Union through political
means; espionage was the business of the Soviet Union’s intelligence
services.To see the American
Communist Party chiefly as an instrument of espionage or a sort of Fifth Column
misjudges its main purpose.”

But within months of publishing that statement we were in Moscow to
examine the long closed records of the Communist International (known as the
Comintern) and the files of the CPUSA itself.What we found there ledto the opening in 1995 of the Venona
documents here in the U.S.Venona
consists nearly 5,000 pages of decoded cable traffic between Soviet intelligence
officers in the U.S. and some elsewhere with their superiors in Moscow.At that pointKlehr and I realized that scholars now
had available a massive array of documentation on Soviet espionage in the early
Cold War.In addition
to Venona and the Moscow archival material, over the last decade a vast
accumulation of FBI and U.S. government agency had become available under the
Freedom of Information Act or routine retirement of records to the National
Archives.All of this allowed a
reappraisal of information that had long been available from court actions and
congressional hearings back in the 1940s and 50s.

The result of this reappraisal is this book Venona: Decoding Soviet
Espionage in America.In this
book we significantly modified what we had written earlier.As we determined based in the new
evidence that not a “few” as we wrote in 1992, but of hundreds of American
Communists had assisted Soviet espionage in the United States, as we read the
deciphered messages showing regional CPUSA officials, members of the party’s
most powerful body, the Political Bureau, and the very head of the party itself
knowingly and purposely assisted Soviet spies, it became crystal clear that
espionage was a regular activity of the American Communist party.To say that the CPUSA was nothing
but a Soviet Fifth Column in the Cold War would be an exaggeration; it still
remains true that the CPUSA’s chief task was the promotion of communism and the
interests of the USSR through political means.But, it is also emphatically true that
in addition to promoting communism through political means, the CPUSA was in
addition a Fifth Column in the Soviet Cold War against the United
States.

The
Main Contours of Soviet Espionage

It is now possible to see that Soviet intelligence operations in the U.S.
fell into several different phases.During the first phase, from the late 1920s through the 1930s, Soviet
intelligence emphasized industrial-technical espionage as well as the use of
American territory for staging intelligence operations in other nations.As in other areas, the Soviets relied
heavily on ideological sympathy as a source for industrial spies.In the 1930s Communist party
membership became largely native-born, and more educated people joined,
including a segment of scientifically and technically-trained
professionals.American Communists
regarded the capitalist corporations they worked for as morally illegitimate
institutions.Consequently, when
Soviet intelligence officers approached and asked that the scientific secrets of
these corporations be shared with the Soviet Union few, none that we know of,
had any moral objections.

In the late 1930s and 1940 the KGB also used the U.S. as one of several
staging areas for multiple KGB plots to murder exiled Soviet leader Leon
Trotsky, then living in Mexico.Indeed, American Communists played a key role in infiltrating Trotsky’s
eventual killer into Trotsky’s household in Mexico City.American Communists were also central to
the KGB efforts, ultimately unsuccessful, to free the murderer from a Mexican
prison .

While it was then a secondary concern, in the mid-1930s Soviet
intelligence began its first operations aimed at American governmental agencies,
particularly the Department of State.By the end of 1936 at least
four mid-level State Department officials were delivering information to Soviet
intelligence: Alger Hiss, assistant to Assistant Secretary of State Francis
Sayre; Julian Wadleigh, economist in the Trade Agreements Section, Laurence
Duggan, Latin American division; and Noel Field, West European division.

The next phase of Soviet espionage came in the early 1940s, after the
Nazi attack on the USSR in June 1941 and American entry into the war in
December.The USSR became a major
recipient of American military aid and thousands of Soviet military officers and
technicians entered the U.S. to assist the aid program.Scores of Soviet intelligence
officers were also among the personnel arriving in America.With these officers and their American
helpers the Soviet Union waged an unrestrained espionage offensive against the
United States from 1942to late
1945.

Soviet recruitment ofsources within American intelligence agencies, particularly within the
Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor to the Central Intelligence
Agency was particularly impressive.The highest ranking of these recruits was Duncan Lee, counsel to General
William Donovan, OSS head.Lee,
however, was extremely cautious and less productive than such KGB sources as
Maurice Halperin and Donald Wheeler, both in the OSS Research and Analysis
division.There were at least
fifteen Soviet agents inside the OSS, with the actual number probably around
twenty.

The Soviets also developed about twenty sources within the U.S. State
Department and other wartime foreign relations agencies.The two most senior had first been
active in the 1930s,Alger Hiss and
Laurence Duggan.A number of Soviet
spies connected to American diplomacy were identified only by code-names in
Venona.Their real identities were
never determined.They may have
continued to spy in the post-war period.American counter-intelligence
officials spent years interviewing and examining the backgrounds of hundreds of
American diplomatic personnel trying to attach a real name to the code-names of
these people but failed.

The U.S. Treasury hosted nearly a dozen Soviet sources, including one of
the most important, Harry White, assistant secretary of the treasury and the
second most influential official in the department.One of White’s contributions to Soviets
was that of protecting Soviet espionage networks.Gregory Silvermaster headed an extremely
large Soviet espionage apparatus.While nominally remaining on the employment rolls of the Farm Security
Administration, Silvermaster arrangedin 1942 to be detailed to the Board of Economic Warfare.The transfer, however, triggered
objections from military counter-intelligence that suspected was a hidden
Communist and regarded him as a security risk.

Silvermaster denied any Communist links and appealed to Under Secretary
of War Robert Patterson to overrule the security officials.Harry White contacted Patterson and told
him that suspicions about Silvermaster were baseless.Lauchlin Currie, a presidential aide who
also cooperated with Soviet intelligence, personally phoned Patterson and urged
a reconsideration of Silvermaster’s case.Patterson chose to trust these highly-placed persons and overruled
military counter-intelligence.His
naive decision facilitated the work of a man who headed one of the most
productive Soviet espionage rings and provided substance for the postwar
Republican charge that high officials in the Roosevelt and Truman
administrations aided Soviet espionage against the United
States.

One could go on and on listing the many dozens of Americans who knowingly
and consciously assisted Soviet espionage in the 1930s and 1940s.In Venona we concluded that
there were more than four hundred.

Soviet intelligence agencies were able to call upon the assistance of
these extraordinary numbers of American because during the 1930s and up to 1946,
they could rely on the help of the CPUSA.The American Communist movement
was not just a recruiting ground for Soviet intelligence.It also functioned as an auxiliary to
Soviet espionage.Earl Browder, the
general secretary of the CPUSA from 1930 until 1945 supervised his party’s
cooperation with the KGB and GRU with the active assistance of a dozen
high-level party officials and numerous rank-and-file members.A 1946 KGB memo gave Browder
personal credit for KGB recruitment of eighteen agents, including several highly
valuable ones.

Many of the KGB’s sources in this period regarded themselves to be under
CPUSA as well as Soviet direction.In early 1945, Akhmerov, the KGB illegal officer, sent a long cable to
Moscow discussing the large Silvermaster apparatus.Akhmerov noted that “it is doubtful
whether ... [the KGB] could get same results as ... [Silvermaster].”He told Moscow that “it costs ...
[Silvermaster] great pains to keep ...[the American sources] in line.... [Silvermaster] being their leader in the CPUSA line helps him give
them orders” and added “that our ... [KGB officers] would not manage to work
with the same success under the CPUSA flag.”The productivity of the CPUSA-based
networks supervised by Akhmerov is illustrated by KGB records of the numbers of
reels of microfilm of U.S. government documents delivered to Moscow via
Akhmerov: 59 in 1942, 211 in 1943, 600 in 1944, and 1,896 in 1945.

Closing
the Barn Door

To use the jargon of Cold
War espionage, in the 1930s and early 1940s there was only limited
“compartmentalization” between the CPUSA and Soviet espionage.The organizational blending of these
different aspects of the Communist movement allowed the Soviet Union to maximize
its return on the assets it possessed.But after World War II when American authorities belatedly paid attention
and the FBI began an aggressive investigation, the vulnerability of this
arrangement also became clear.An
organization as large as the CPUSA had too many areas of weakness.Many party-linked espionage operations
were exposed and neutralized by American counter-intelligence in the late 1940s
and 1950s.And the CPUSA itself
became tainted with disloyalty.

Some in the KGB saw it coming.In late 1944 two senior KGB officers, Stephan Apresyan of the New York
KGB station, and Vladimir Pravdin, a KGB officer who worked out of Washington,
sent cables to Moscow criticizing each other’s performance but also disagreeing
over KGB tactics.Apresyan
denounced Pravdin for believing that “without the help of the ... [American
Communists] we are completely powerless.” Apresyan argued that “it is ... untrue
that without ...[Browder] we are
‘powerless.’” While “we shall have to have recourse to the ... [American
Communists] ... they ought not to be the one and only base especially if you
take into account the fact that in the event of ... [Thomas Dewey’s] being
elected [U.S. president] this source may dry up.”Apresyan lost that particular
argument.Dewey was not elected in
1944, and the KGB was able to continue to use the CPUSA as an auxiliary, but the
reprieve ended in 1945.

In August 1945 Elizabeth Bentley turned herself in to the
government.The Soviets quickly
closed down the networks with which she worked and withdrew from the U.S. those
KGB officers whom she knew.On the
heels of Bentley’s defection came Igor Gouzenko, a GRU cipher clerk at the
Soviet embassy in Canada who disclosed information about Soviet espionage both
in Canada and the U.S..By the end
of 1946 evidence indicating large-scale Soviet espionage operations in the U.S.
had grown formidable.Further, the
external context had also changed.American expectations that Europe would be reconstructed as democratic
and independent nations as promised in the Atlantic Charter, the Four Freedoms,
and the Declaration of Liberated Europe, soon ran into the reality of Stalin’s
policies in Central and Eastern Europe.The Truman administration shifted in fits and starts towards a policy of
confrontation with Soviet foreign policy and also shifted from a policy of
indifference towards Soviet espionage to active hostility.Secretary of State Byrnes quietly eased
Alger Hiss out of the State Department in 1946.That same year the FBI began notifying
senior administrators of security concerns about those several score persons
identified by Bentley who still worked for the government; most were forced to
seek employment in the private sector or found their jobs abolished.President Truman issued an
executive order setting up a loyalty program for federal government
employees.Then in 1948 the Truman
administration indicted the leaders of the CPUSA under the sedition sections of
the 1940 Smith Act.Later the
Truman administration would undertake prosecutions of Alger Hiss and the
Rosenbergs.The 1944 fears of KGB
officer Apresyan came true.The
CPUSA dried up as a base for Soviet espionage once the administration got
serious about internal security and authorized the FBI and other security
agencies to vigorously pursue Communists.

Espionage,
the CPUSA, and Postwar Anticommunism

The massive size of the Soviet espionage offensive in World War II, the
role of the CPUSA as an auxiliary to espionage, and the extent to which the
CPUSA remained under the control of an antidemocratic hostile foreign power are
fundamental to understanding the postwar anti-Communist era in American
politics.